


How Sweet the Moonlight

by KillerKueen



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: F/M, Rumbelle Revelry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-02
Updated: 2017-11-02
Packaged: 2019-01-28 10:56:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,165
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12605036
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KillerKueen/pseuds/KillerKueen
Summary: Belle wasn’t looking for him. He wasn’t exactly looking for her, either.For the Rumbelle Revelry on tumblr. My prompts were Full moon, witchcraft, haunted woods and Eerie





	How Sweet the Moonlight

Belle leaves town the day Ashley Boyd is killed by Sean Herman in a fit of passion.

Passion is their word. The townspeople with their wide eyes and hushed voices. Their way to describe the tumultuous obsession that marked the young lovers’ brief relationship, the jealous realization that Sean couldn’t live without Ashley in his life.

There is little point to ask what shy, mousy Ashley had done to attract the handsome man in the first place. Even more is what could have set Sean, always calm and so sweet, into such a rage that he unlocked his father’s handgun. It is sickly romantic, how he turned the gun on himself when he’d seen what he’d done.

It is months later when Ashley’s step-sister finds the bottle under the floorboard of Ashley’s old room. Opaque glass of red wine mixed with crushed primroses, a dash of cinnamon to taste. She finds it half empty, the wine stale and sour.

* * *

If Belle had any sense, she would have left after Gaston.

* * *

The lodge is dilapidated and run down, the stairs of the porch warped. The large gardens are overrun with weeds and briars, though the wildflowers are pleasant in the sunset. The air smells sweet, and Belle is warm and tired after a long drive. She thinks that this is the place; an old abandoned building in the middle of an old abandoned wood.

With the glow of the sun, with her packed bag and the sweet fragrant air, the lodge is inviting. Quaint. Dry and stale, if a little dusty.

It’s a large thing, though, and all she has is her books and her determination (and not a small amount of guilt).

(Maybe, if she is lucky, there will be space enough to house all of it).

That first night, she sits on the porch staring out into the woods. The half-moon casts a pale glow, but otherwise all is dark around the house. She can faintly see the outline of the tall trees. She can’t see the trails that weave into the forests, and knows that if she were to go down one, she’d be lost almost instantly. Idly, she wonders about what she’d find at the end of such a trail.

Come sunrise, the crickets stop chirping, replaced with the morning calls of birds.

Belle stands, and goes back inside.

* * *

Belle sweeps away the cobwebs. She traces each crack she finds in the windowpanes. She doesn’t walk in the woods, not yet, but she collects the smoothest stones she can find on the outskirts and lays them by the gate. She wishes she knew the old prayers, her mother’s incantations.

Her mother used to bury pouches of raven feathers, egg shells and salt in the corners of the yard (only once did she bury bone but that was before her father died and it was too little, too late).

Belle collects the feathers she finds in the weeds that grow at her windowsills, but she leaves them on the kitchen counter, a soft pile that shines like silk when the sun hits the glass just right. She thinks of leaving them by the back door (curled in like a hangnail, refusing to latch) but she likes how they gleam.

Each night she sits on the porch and gazes into the dark woods surrounding her. Sometimes she dozes, her head lolling to the side. Just before the sun crests Belle stands, shuffles back inside where she falls asleep on the velvet fainting couch. It’s out of place, there in the lodge in the forest, but it smells like rich soil and clean mountain air, so she doesn’t mind. She sleeps till late morning.

She leaves the gate unlocked.

* * *

It’s the night of the full moon when she steps off her porch, the old wooden steps creaking under her weight. She opens the gate as easily as breathing, and nothing calls her back as she passes through. She chooses the third trail on the left, the shadows wide and welcoming as they stretch between the chittering aspen trees.

Belle walks. She isn’t wearing shoes, hadn’t even thought to slip into her old boots, but the path is clear of any debris. She walks for hours, for days, the ground never sloping, the aspens’ eyes prickling her neck.

She stops when she sees the lake, the water a glass mirror in the moonlight. She sees the figure, standing on the shore. She sees his back, his shaggy hair brushing his shoulders. Unremarkable, really. Just a man, in the mountains.

Something tingles in Belle’s scalp, and she shakes her head, trying to dislodge it. She wants to call out, but instead she shivers, remembering that her feet are bare and her night gown is thin; she hadn’t taken her shawl.

Just as well, she thinks as she turns away. The rocks on the shoreline would have cut her skin to ribbons. Belle walks back down the path, and it isn’t until she closes the gate that her hands start to shake.

She falls alseep on the fainting couch and when she wakes, she makes a tea of orange peels and honey, and wonders.

( _Coward_ , her rooms say, full of guilt)

* * *

Perhaps he has been there awhile, the roots and shells fusing to his ankles, anchoring him to the shore like ivy.

(He is there on the next full moon, and the next, and the one after that. It is only then that Belle can find the path with the aspen that lead to the waiting man and his lake.)

He is still, always so still, eyes focused on something distant across the water that Belle can’t quite see, though she tries. She gets as close to him as she dares, a few feet behind, maybe slightly to the right. She wants to reach out and touch his back, trail her fingers up his spine and to his shoulders. She wants to run her fingers through his hair.

His face is made up of sharp angles—high cheek bones, long, pointed nose, square jawline that she wants to lick (she isn’t sure where the desire comes from, but she welcomes the warmth that pools in her belly.)

The man is waiting.

So she waits too.

* * *

Something is different tonight.

He is looking down, instead of out. He holds something in his hands, his sharp elbows drawn in.

Belle breathes in the moonlight, the cool lake air. She steps closer to her ivy-rooted man.

He has a straw doll, muddy and brown, wearing what was once a colorful shirt and pants. It looks homemade, old. The man’s head is beant, his hair curtaining his face.

“Are you okay?” she asks, her voice feeling too loud in the quiet. It is creaky, unused.

He jumps at her sudden appearance, clutching the doll protectively to his chest. He looks at her, eyes wide and golden.

“You could rinse it off in the water.”

He presses the doll closer to his chest; shakes his head. “I don’t go into the water.” His voice is rough, stilted, and it warms Belle that he’s as unaccustomed to talking to people as she is.

“Why not?”

He opens his mouth. She follows his tongue as it licks across his lips. “I’d rather just watch,” he says with a helpless little shrug.

“Can I watch, too?” she asks, and he tucks the doll into a pocket in his vest and nods.

They stare at the lake together, Belle squinting at the trees on the opposite shoreline. She doesn’t ask what they are watching for. She wants to hear his voice (rough, unused) again.

“Why don’t you want to go into the water?”

“There are all kinds of wee lake beasties that want to swallow me whole and spit out my bones.“

Belle squints, not at the trees, but at him. His words sound like a tale her mother might have told her, and it makes her think of thunderstorms and fires, of egg shells and salt and too little, too late.

"You’re afraid,” she says. The breeze picks up. Her loose hair (his loose hair) dances around her face (his hair is streaked with grey. The lines around his eyes look like scars).

“Yes. I’m afraid.”

* * *

“Why are you here?” she asks the man. She has spread out a blanket, hoping to get him to rest, to move from his eternal vigil. He refuses, and so she is sitting, leaning back on her hands, legs crossed. He watches her for awhile before he answers.

(She watches back, at his sharp-nosed face, his soft lips, his deep, lovely eyes like the glass surface of a lake)

“I’m waiting.”

“Hm,“ she says.

"Why are you here?” he asks politely.

Belle smiles, thinking of her mountain lodge and her fainting couch. She does not think about the town, nor of the shame and guilt living in her home. “Because it suits me.”

It’s his turn to hum, the sound warm as it rattles in his chest. He’s still watching her, looking down as she sits on her blanket. Time moves slow, these full moon nights. He looks at her for days before he asks, “What are you?”

She can feel his eyes on her, expectant and honest, and her cheeks flush red in response.

“I’m nothing,” she tells him, and she wants it to be true. Wants it just as badly as she wants him.

She avoids glancing at his face as she gets clumsily to her feet. She leaves the blanket where it is.

“I’m nothing,” she says again, unsure of whether she is trying to convince herself or the man who stands before her, a statue on the shore, a waiter by the waves.

She takes a step towards the lake (she never goes in the water, either). The air is still warm, and it makes her think that maybe the water will be, too.

“Come to the water,“ She begs. "Just to the edge.”

He shakes his head no but she can see his muscles twitching with the promise of movement. “Just to the edge, i mean it.”

He walks slow, his feet and legs uprooting from their place on the shore. She holds out her hand, smiling when he takes it. Their feet wiggle in the sand and he stands with her in the shallows, letting the water break against his shins.

“I’m sinking,” he says, staring down at his feet.

“Yes, when the waves leave they take the sand with them.”

He nods and watches the beach disappear from underneath him, quietly letting the ocean swallow him inch by inch. He doesn’t let go of her hand.

“You don’t need to be afraid anymore. It’s not so bad, now is it?”

“No, it’s not so bad.”

Belle feels unnecessarily proud of him standing there, proud of his pale, vulnerable feet and sharp, crooked nose. The feeling overwhelms her from the inside out and makes her brave.

She steps close to him, rises on her tip toes. She presses her lips to his, softly, gently. He doesn’t pull away so she presses harder, chasing the taste of salt and midnight.

The water grasps at their legs with hungry fingers.

* * *

She’s lost track of the months, of the seasons. She still collects her feathers, still sleeps in late on her fainting couch. She waits impatiently for the full moon. Belle walks through the aspen just as the sun is setting, as the shadows begin to stretch between. When she reaches it, the lake heaves before her like some sort of dark, panting beast.

As Belle walks to their spot on the shore, she finds herself idly pondering stupid questions.  _Where did you come from? Where do you go?_ When she opens her mouth to ask him these things, she accidentally asks something else.

“Have you always been alone?”

The man looks at her and his sharp face sags, dulling, before righting itself.

“No,” he admits carefully. Belle watches the man, but the movement has left him. It is her fault, her and her questions, but she can’t find that particular bit of regret.

There is a mystery in him, she can feel it. It crawls and frets beneath the surface of his skin. Belle knows that it is wrong to press him but she can’t stop herself.

“Is that who you’re waiting for?” she asks. The words float in the air between them, glittering and shaking, impossible to ignore.

“Sometimes,” he says, and his face slowly breaks into a half-smile. “But I’m hardly alone now, am I?”

Belle flushes. His smile is crooked and beautiful, and with his lip pulled up like that, she can see just a glimpse of his white teeth. They might be crooked. She wants to trace them with her tongue.

Unbidden, another question is pushed past her mouth: “Why are you haunting me?”

Surprise, not unpleaset, flitters across his face.

“My dear,” he says, voice rough. “You’re the one haunting me.”


End file.
